Organized Crime & Gangs

In an effort to reduce gasoline theft, State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pamex) has changed their distribution methods, resulting in shortages and long lines at refueling stations across 6 states. Fuel theft in the country had risen from around $500,000 USD per year in the early 2000s to around $3

“About 300 troops have been sent to the north-eastern Brazilian city of Fortaleza to tackle a surge in criminal violence, authorities said. Soldiers will patrol there and across the state of Ceará in a bid to halt attacks on shops, banks and buses. The justice ministry ordered the special deployment

“Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador used his first news conference of 2019 to start recruitment for his new National Guard, which will become the country’s primary security force. Lopez Obrador says the government hopes to recruit about 50,000 civilians to add to the guard’s initial composition of military personnel

Government crackdowns against social media users continued in 2018. In Turkey, “Judicial actions have been taken against 2,793 social media users in 2018, Istanbul police have said in a statement. According to the written statement, judicial actions were taken against 750 people for conducting ‘terrorist propaganda’ on their social media

While cryptocurrencies are involved in only a small fraction of the estimated $2 trillion trillion in laundered money every year, its share is rising. Now, the DEA has stated that Mexican drug cartels are increasingly using money laundering and cryptocurrency channels based in Asia to move and “clean” their money.

“The FBI has seized control of 15 websites that let people pay to knock individuals and other sites offline. The so-called booters sought to swamp targets with huge amounts of data in what are known as distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Three US men have been charged with allegedly offering DDoS services.

“The U.N. drugs and crime chief said Wednesday that his office is registering ‘new, alarming trends’ in drug trafficking in western and central Africa that are destabilizing the ability of country’s to govern as well as security, economic growth and public health. Yuri Fedotov told the Security Council that criminal

“The murder of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a year when more than half of all journalists killed were targeted deliberately reflects a hatred of the media in many areas of society, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Tuesday. At least 63 professional journalists around the world were killed doing

Many of Berlin crime organizations known as “clans” were started by refugees of the Lebanon war in the 1980s, mostly Arabic and Kurdish-origin extended-family networks that control a huge chunk of the city’s drug trade, prostitution, and protection. These gangs work alongside or in competition with several homegrown, Eastern European,

“Save the Children Federation, one of the country’s best-known charities, said it was the victim of a $1 million cyberscam last year. The Connecticut-based nonprofit said hackers broke into a worker’s e-mail, posed as an employee, and created false invoices and other documents, to fool the charity into sending nearly